Many consumer, commercial and industrial products, including liquid laundry detergents have been known in the art for decades. For example, in the context of laundry detergents, many are comprised of blends of synthetic anionic, nonionic and conditioning cationic surfactants, along with any number of additional ingredients such as builders, dispersants, soil-release polymers, detersive enzymes and bleaching agents to improve cleaning performance and to arrive at consumer acceptable performance at a reasonable cost.
The prior art is nearly void of compositions that claim suitable performance through the use of eco-friendly ingredients. Heretofore there have simply been no suitable “across-the-board” substitutions of unfriendly ingredients to more ecologically friendly ingredients in a laundry detergent composition to yield compositions that can still provide consumer acceptable performance at reasonable cost to the manufacturer. It is simple (as shown in the art) to make sensible substitutions or reductions of one or a few ingredients, (for example, ability to reduce builder or surfactant by increasing enzyme levels), however, a wholesale replacement of all ingredients in a composition with eco-friendly ingredients typically results in a serious reduction in performance.
One way to increase performance in a laundry detergent and reduce pollution is to replace high surfactant and builder levels with high enzyme levels, for example, through the replacement of surfactants, builders, polymers, and bleaches in detergent compositions with enzymes.
However, it is problematic to apply this strategy for the replacement of all suspect ingredients in a composition, as the required multiple types of enzymes need to be combined and stabilized in ways that heretofore have not been explored and additional ingredients beyond the enzymes will be needed to make up for lost performance. For example, when common surfactants are replaced with eco-friendly surfactants, and the highly alkaline builder/chelant systems are eliminated, then simply increasing enzyme level is not enough, and the technology that is truly missing from the art is how to combine the right combinations of different enzymes at the right levels, using the right enzyme stabilizers with the right eco-friendly co-ingredients to boost the performance back to consumer acceptable levels.
Moreover, until the present invention, laundry detergents (and other products) generally sacrificed performance and biodegradability and/or contained minimal natural ingredients, as well as had higher carbon footprints.
It has now been found that by lowering the surfactant levels and replacing them with other components, a lower carbon footprint can be realized. Additionally, surprisingly the combination of certain biodegradable anionic materials with alkyl polyglycoside surfactants and enzyme mixtures, together with “natural essences”, can lead to stable liquid laundry detergents that are comprised entirely or nearly entirely of eco-friendly ingredients, yet still have performance at par or even superior to past traditional liquids that use much less friendly constituents. Importantly, the present invention results in a low “carbon footprint” and maximizes performance and biodegradability, and uses natural ingredients.